


Stag stew and fried onions

by Talimee



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Crack, Humor, M/M, Out of Character, Rough Kissing, Translation, magic mushrooms, off-screen shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 13:59:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10280171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talimee/pseuds/Talimee
Summary: The whole of Westeron knows the Tale of Stannis Baratheon and Davos Seaworth. How the brave smuggler saved the besieged Stannis from starvation with onions and salted fish and how Stannis showed his gratitude towards Davos in gifting him with a knighthood, title and lands. And how he took the tips of Davos' left hand fingers.The fungus spores although are a topic my bard colleagues graciously do not comment upon. So let me instead, honored audience, sing a song about what really happened on this day.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Hirschragout mit Zwiebelringen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8163067) by [Squickqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squickqueen/pseuds/Squickqueen). 



> This is a translation of Squickqueen's story and although I have done my best to stay close to the source, nothing on Earth measures up to her crack humour.

 

~*~

 

"Main sail ready to set!"

A powerful voice bellowed with mightily against the wind, which was jowling around the sailors' ears and whipped the sea into frothy hell.

"Rudder hard starboard!"

The ship's prow scythed through the waves, hurtling foaming water through the air. The black sails drummed and cracked in the hurricane as the crew set them with sure hands. It was a small but proud boat that ploughed through the wild sea.

"My Lord Stannis, please stay below deck! The swell ..."

The man now coming on deck cut the words short like the headman's axe the neck of a convict. No emotion could be seen in the man's stern face, not a smidgen of a smile graced his eyes.

"Save your breath, Ser Davos. Such a pallid wind is not going to kill me. I have seen and survived worse weather."

Davos nodded curtly and continued to holler orders to his crew, while Stannis Baratheon walked up to the railing and looked broodingly out over the boiling sea. Davos thought he knew what the other man was thinking about: the siege of Storm's End had been over for a handful of days and already Robert Baratheon had ordered his younger brother to rebuild the fleet and capture Dragonstone, the ancestral home of House Targaryen.

The famine the Lord of Storm's End had lived through had left traces on his face: sunk-in cheeks, grey skin, eyes fallen deep into their sockets. He must be tired. Maybe he felt bone-wary from the perpetual cold and damp which sat in the castle's thick walls like mice in a granary. Davos ached to cheer Stannis up with some well-meant words, or a cup of hot rum, but the knight knew that a cold shoulder was all he could expect as an answer.

“Ser Davos!”

Upon hearing his name, the smuggler-captain passed command to his first officer and stepped next to Stannis at the rails.

“Mylord?”

“This is the same route you used to provide us with putrid onions and over salted fish?”

Davos scratched his beard.

“Yes. We were lucky – we had calm waters during the siege. With a swell like today it'd be impossible to sail into the caves without risking the ship.” _It's dangerous enough to sail Shipbreaker Bay in this weather. If the wind gets stronger, we'll turn around!_

But he kept quiet about his qualms, for the moment. He was willing, for Stannis, to wade through all hells the religions of Westeros could muster. When his Lord wished to visit the smugglers' route in stormy weather Davos would obey the command. He owed all to the stern, strong-willed man. Just this morning Stannis had knighted him and given him considerable holdings.

Ser Davos Seaworth, the Onion Knight.

The title had just the right amount of well-measured teasing to keep Davos level-headed.

“A solid feat of nautical craftsmanship, nevertheless, Ser Davos.”

Was that praise? That was praise, indeed! Davos' chest was preparing to swell with pride when the ship suddenly lurched to one side. Whoever was not prepared to latch onto something was brutally thrown down onto the deck.

Or washed over the railing, like Stannis.

“Mylord!” Davos managed to grasp Stannis' arm. He held on to the railing with all his might, pushed his feet and his whole weight against the planks and for a blink of an eye he thought it might work out when he suddenly was jerked up himself and tossed overboard. He lost his grip on Stannis' arm and then the sea rushed up to meet him.

_Mylord!_

*

Davos broke through the surface coughing and spitting. The cold seawater was heavy as lead on his limbs and burned in his eyes. He kicked water desperately, trying to keep his head over water like a dog, until his feet suddenly scraped against firm ground. The smuggler-captain was nearly crying with relief, as he, fatigued and exhausted, fought his way out of the water inch by inch. He crawled on land on all fours, collapsing on the rocky cliff-face right between heaps of rusty mail and tattered cloth which littered this unfriendly shore along with countless bones. No, this strip of land was not very inviting. The sharp edges of the rock cut into Davos' palms but he ignored it. He was safe! For the time being. His strength dripped slowly back into his frozen body, and eventually he sat up.

Now, where was he? Most likely the waves and currents had disposed him in one of the countless caves under Storm's End, which honeycombed the rock like an anthill. Phosphorescent fungi hung from the walls and grew on the ceilings, illuminating the cave sufficiently enough to let Davos see his hand in front of his eyes.

Interesting, that he had never spotted them when doing his supply-runs for the castle last week.

Somewhere water was dripping down, the echo of each drip mixing itself with the sounds of the raging sea outside and caused Davos to shiver. He was growing cold.

Groaning, he eventually dragged himself up on his feet, paused for a moment when he thought that his legs would give away under his weight, made a step and put his foot right in the middle of a clump of brightly glowing fungi. He jerked back when gleaming spores twirled upwards and stepped right into another clump and was momentarily engulfed in a cloud of glimmering spores. They got up into his nose and into his mouth and made the pitiful Onion Knight sneeze. He wiped a hand across his face to get rid of the spores … And now he was glowing like one of these mushrooms himself!

Well, at least the spores did not seem to be poisonous. On the contrary, he started to feel quite happy, then euphoric and at last he was feeling so joyful he started to skip happily into one of the side-tunnels which forked away from the main cavern.

Even as the walls of said tunnel closed in on him and the low ceiling got lower and finally forced him to crawl on all fours Davos was still ecstatic and even started to sing:

  
_And who are you, called the fisher's wife,_

_stinking from your head and clad in scales?_

_Only another fish from the scoop,_

_it's right, I vow to it._

_Be it pike or carp or trout,_

_every fish has gills,_

_and yours look most deliciously fine,_

_I think I'll filet you._

 

Davos' shoulders scraped along the walls, then, suddenly, the narrow passage was over and spat the smuggler into a small chamber just as high as the Hound was tall and maybe ten paces wide at its broadest place.

And on a bed of mouldy straw, bones, fur and cloth, adorned and safely bound with a red velvet ribbon, lay Stannis Baratheon. He was glowing as if he had fallen into the fungi as well and was, apart from the velvet band, absolutely, shockingly and entirely naked. The ribbon snaked artistically around Stannis' body and ended in a big bow, neatly placed on Stannis' crotch.

Davos' throat became very dry all of a sudden.

“Tug at me!”, waved the bow.

“Tug at the bow!”, twinkled Stannis' grey eyes.

How could he resist?

Presently the noble Ser Onion Knight knelt down in the straw and tugged carefully at the ribbon whereupon the Stannis-parcel unfurled like a flower-crown in the warm sun of a spring morning.

The unbound Stannis immediately threw his arms around Davos' neck and kissed him so thoroughly that Davos lost his balance and fell backwards onto the straw pallet. A bed of roses could not be sweeter, he thought, before Stannis' kisses made coherent thoughts impossible once again. The man was not only hard as steel – in every aspect of life – he also tasted like it, Davos noted when he could think and breathe again.

“Oh, I knew you would come, Ser Davos!”, trilled Stannis like a maid in her first tryst. “My hero, my shining knight, my Scallionlet!”

“I'd do anything for you, Mylord. Walk through the fires of the seven hells, sail Shipbreaker Bay in a hurricane, learn to read!”

Stannis tugged playfully at Davos' beard.

“Then you would surely discard those pesky clothes of yours, instead of letting me wait any longer!”

Ser Davos was tugging at his other boot when he heard it: A distant hissing, a bubbling and blubbering, a sniffing and snorting as if someone was trying to inhale slimy seawater through a straw stuck into a nose. Even though his brain was still addled from both the spores and Stannis' obvious advances – by the Seven, was he supposed to take Lady Selyse's place in the matrimonial bed?! – Davos reacted instantly when a beast jumped at him out of the cave's dark back. A beast like he had never seen before; scaly fish-skin, webbed paws and gills like the Fishking he had sung about on his way here.

Even though Davos danced sideways with astounding quickness, did the Fishking's claws catch on his shoulder and ripped his cloak's thick cloth apart. Had the beast just waited a moment longer, it would have carved the flesh from Davos' bones.

More angry than afraid Davos balled his fist and punched the advancing beast into its small-lipped maw, when it snapped at his throat with razor-sharp teeth. Instead of bashing the thing's teeth in, though, they got stuck in Davos' hand. Strong jaws closed around Davos' fingers with the fervour of a monster that was craving for human flesh. Davos drove his knee into the beast's stomach, once, twice, thrice, before his fingers gave way with a sickening crack. The Fishking hissed with bloody foam dripping from its maw, when Davos' other fist jammed into its head like a hammer and threw it to the ground howling and shaking its head.

Dumbfounded, Davos looked at the thick drops of blood wallowing up from his mauled hand before Realisation and _Pain_ hit him and forced him down, drawing a black curtain over his eyes and other senses. If Stannis hadn't pulled a rusty sword from a straw pile at this moment and decapitated the freshly charging Fishking, it would have been the end of the Onion Knight.

“Mylord”, Davos stammered when Stannis sat down next to him and started to dress the wound.

“Steady, Scallionlet. It's over. The Fishking is finally dead and will harrow the Kingdom no more, nor devour maidens for breakfast. You performed excellently when you swallowed the bait, in other words: me.”

Davos blinked. He was utterly confused. Maidens? Bait? Plan?

“This was a ruse to kill the Fishking?”

“Indeed. What did _you_ think? And now, it is time for your reward, dearest Ser Onion Knight.” Stannis gently kissed Davos' bandaged hand before helping him out of his damp clothes and easing him down into the straw.

*

That night the people of Storm's End wondered about the weird and otherworldly sounds coming up through rock and deep cellars.

“Must be the wind”, they said to themselves. “It moans and bellows especially intense today.”

*

Sometime later the fungus-spores lost their light and the euphoria ended abruptly. Suddenly the cave was damp and uncomfortable, the straw was not a velvet bed of roses any more and stank and it was unbelievably cold.

Davos snuggled deeper into the fleeting warmth of his nest until the pounding pain in his cut-off fingers dragged him away from the depths of sleep. Groaning, he sat up and cradled his wounded hand against his chest. He felt woozy but the fog in his mind cleared up instantly when he discovered the reason why he was cold: he was stark naked in a cave from which ceiling icy waters dropped down his neck. Next to him, an arm thrown possessively over the smuggler's crotch, lay Stannis Baratheon, brother to the freshly crowned King of the Andals and the First Men, who just about regained his consciousness.

Suddenly, Ser Davos, Onion Knight and Head of the House Seaworth, was very intend on finding his clothes and covering himself with them.

Stannis coughed and sat up, his gaze searching blearily around until it latched itself onto Davos' bearded face. He blinked once, then a second time, then his jaws began to clench.

“Ser Davos.”

“Mylord?”

“What exactly happened here?”

“We went overboard and wound up in a cave under Storm's End and then … I cannot recollect any more, Mylord. At least, nothing sensible.”

“Did you dream about a Fishking, too?”

“Yes.”

“And was I … was I …” Stannis couldn't bring himself to say it.

“I fear so, Mylord. Nicely wrapped up.”

The look Stannis gave him would've frozen a glacial lake.

“I think”, Davos was eager to add, “that the fungus-spores were behind it. We hallucinated and now the effect is gone. Look, the Fishking is nothing more than a mangy dog now.”

“And your bitten-off fingers are a hallucination as well?”

Davos was silent. He didn't dare to point out that certain bodily activities might have been just as real as his bitten-off fingers. He was clever enough not to follow this trail of thought and blame it all safely on the glowing spores' effect.

“Let us not talk about this any more, Ser Davos”, formulated Stannis Davos' thoughts.

“Of course. As you say, Mylord.”

Stannis cleared his throat and stood up stiffly to search for his clothes. He vanished in a dark corner and reappeared only when he had clad himself from head to toe.

“I will think up some reasonable explanation for your shortened hand. Well then, where is the exit?”

 

~*~

 


End file.
